This Very Short Introduction discusses the necessity of welfare states in modern capitalist societies. Situating social policy in an historical, sociological, and comparative perspective, David Garland brings a new understanding to familiar debates, policies, and institutions.

Otiginally published in 1975. At the time that Louis Galambos published The Public Image of Big Business in America in 1975, America had matured into a bureaucratic state. The expression of the military-industrial complex and big business grew so pervasive that the postwar United States was defined in large part by its citizens' participation in large-scale organizational structures. Noticing this development, Galambos maintains that the "single most significant phenomenon in modern American history is the emergence of giant, complex organizations." Today, bureaucratic organizations influence the day-to-day lives of most Americans--they gather taxes, regulate businesses, provide services, administer welfare, provide education, and on and on. These organizations are defined by their hierarchical structure in which the power of decision-making is allotted according to abstract rules that create impersonal scenarios. Bureaucracies have developed as a result of technological changes in the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on the premise that these structures had a stronger influence on modern America than any other single phenomenon, this book explores the public's response to the growth of the power and influence of bureaucracy from the years 1880 through 1930. What results is an examination of the social perception of bureaucracy and the development of bureaucratic culture.

In Making American Industry Safe for Democracy, a work of historical sociology, Jeffrey Haydu explores how basic political and economic relationships were restabilized in the aftermath of the war. Haydu compares U.S. efforts to reconstruct an open-shop regime that excluded trade unions with the reform of industrial relations in Britain and Germany. Then he compares industries within the United States and traces the extraordinarily complex manner in which prewar class relations and wartime crisis led the state to restructure employee representation. In this important study of new strategies for managing work and conflict that were emerging by the 1920s, the author also forces us to reassess the role of organization in shaping working-class mobilization and protest.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that the unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state. Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in the private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence, Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care. Labor, Gottschalk asserts, missed an important opportunity to develop a broader progressive agenda. She challenges the movement to establish a position on health care that addresses the growing ranks of Americans without insurance, the restructuring of the U.S. economy, and the political travails of the unions themselves.